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Month: February 2016

In the picture above, you can see the new baseball cards that I’ve purchased since the start of the 2015 collecting season. These boxes contain complete sets of the following:

2015 Topps Series 1

2015 Topps Series 2

2015 Topps Heritage Master Set

2015 Topps Allen & Ginter Set

2015 Topps Update Series

These boxes were all purchased from a case breaker who has always been more than fair to me. If I want new baseball cards in the year they are released, this seems to me the best way to do it. I can let the breaker have fun with the added value and I can pay for only the cards I know I want. I don’t have to open a pack of cards and wonder if the card I’m looking at is a variation or the card that belongs to the main set. I don’t have to worry about parallels. I can only purchase the insert sets I actually want to keep.

This arrangement has worked for me for a few years now, but there’s a catch. Through 2014, within a week of receiving my sets, I would have them in binders. I would carefully go through each set and examine each card, even reading the backs on Heritage and most base Topps cards. Even if there were numerous things I didn’t like about the sets, I still managed to enjoy them.

I thought that the 2015 Topps set was easily the most interesting base set they’ve put out in a long, long time, and yet, mine sits in the box it was shipped in. I thumbed through Series 1 when I received it, but Series 2, Update, Heritage and A&G are unmolested. This raises the question: why did I buy these cards?

It’s not a question I can answer yet other than to say, I’m not ready to give up on new baseball cards just yet. I don’t want to be sitting here in a few years wondering why I stopped.

One note: not all of my 2015 baseball card sets were purchased already completed from a case breaker. I put together 2015 Topps Stadium Club together through retail purchases, one random lot on eBay and a few trades. This is easily my favorite Topps set since the early Allen & Ginter sets. I’ve never seen better photography in a baseball card set. (It’s far superior to the tightly cropped action photos that dominate the base set.) This set was the most few I’ve had with new baseball cards in year and I figure there’s no way Topps can screw it up in 2016 either. I’ll be back! (Wait – variations and short prints? Crap.)

The arrival of 2016 Topps Series 1 has convinced me that I should focus on building a few vintage sets since I have no intention of building a modern set. (I buy them already completed occasionally, but I can’t imagine buying an unopened box.) The question becomes: which vintage sets should I make a go at? I settled almost immediately on 1954 Topps as one of those sets. I had toyed with the idea last year and purchased a few cheap lots off of eBay, but I then went through a period of what I can only call “collecting ennui”. I had to contemplate whether I still wanted to be a part of this hobby or not. I went almost three months without buying a single card, which I haven’t done since I returned to collecting 11 years ago. But, I’ve got the bug again. Maybe it’s the new season being upon us, but I want baseball cards.

So, here’s my thinking on trying to complete a 1954 Topps set: I already have the Hank Aaron rookie and there’s no Mickey Mantle card. I love Mickey Mantle as a historical baseball figure, but I have no interest in paying the premium his cards command if I can avoid it. As for the Aaron rookie, it’s the one baseball card I’ve always wanted, and owning it is nothing short of a dream come true. (I pull it out of a binder every few days and just sort of stare at it in awe.)

So, the Aaron makes an impressive start to the set, but if you know vintage sets, you know the cards that will make this set difficult, or rather expensive, to complete. There’s the Ernie Banks rookie. There’s the Al Kaline rookie. Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays are in the set. More importantly, there are the two Ted Williams cards that bookend the set. I can only hope that somewhere out there, there are two perfectly creased Ted Williams cards with my name on them. That, however, is a story for another day.

I work from home and occasionally, I work for a client who thinks its a good use of time to keep consultants on the phone for the most pointless meetings. Yesterday, I literally spent three continuous hours on the phone and did not have to say a single word. There was not one word said about any of my projects. If I’m at the office, all I can do is stare at the other people in the room with contempt. Since I work from home, I got out a 2 inch binder, a box of 8 count pages, and my stack of 1954 Topps baseball cards. By the end of the meeting, my future set was in the binder, my want list was posted on the web site, and a scan of my only full page wasn’t completed. Now that’s what I call productive.

There are so many great players in this set even beyond the Aaron, Kaline, and Banks rookies. Not one of those great players appears on my first completed page and that’s OK. This is still an interesting group of guys.

My favorite player on the page is the late Jay Heard from Athens, Georgia. After a few sporadic appearances in the negro leagues, he moved on to the independent minor leagues where after a few seasons of success, his contract was purchased by the Orioles. Heard was shelled in the second of his two appearances and was sent down to the minors. He never got another taste of the big leagues. This, unfortunately, was not at all uncommon for black players at the time. You were either great, or you were in the minors.